Tag Archives: Advisory Board

I’m pleased to pass on to the Integrative Law community this announcement from Advisory Board member Dacher Keltner’s Greater Good Science Center, one of ILI’s partner organizations. Mindfulness and other self-awareness practices are part of the core skills that integrative lawyers can bring to our work with clients experiencing conflict. Learning the skills taught in this workshop can make you more present, energetic, attentive, and compassionate when working on high-stress cases, to your own personal benefit as well as to the benefit of your clients.

with Jon Kabat-Zinn, Paul Gilbert, Dacher Keltner, Kristin Neff, Shauna Shapiro, and othersWhen: March 8, 2013Where: Craneway Conference Center, Richmond, CA (just north of Berkeley–map it) or tune in via Live WebcastHosted by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and Mindful: Taking Time for What MattersA day-long conference to help you deepen connections to others and care for yourself, drawing on cutting-edge science
This day-long conference, featuring a keynote by Jon Kabat-Zinn, will illuminate the connections between mindfulness and compassion, focusing on how mindfulness can deepen relationships and build compassion, including self-compassion. Speakers will discuss how to apply scientific findings to the real world, drawing on cutting-edge research and inspiring success stories. Attendees will practice research-tested mindfulness and compassion techniques and learn from program leaders who have fostered mindfulness and compassion in schools, health care, and beyond.

Other presenters will include Kristin Neff, PhD, author of Self-Compassion; Paul Gilbert, PhD, founder of Compassion Focused Therapy; Shauna Shapiro, PhD, expert on integrating mindfulness into Western psychology, medicine, and education; and Dacher Keltner, PhD, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center. Event will be webcast live!

We are delighted to announce that Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., has joined the Advisory Board of the Integrative Law Institute. A leading researcher and scholar in the relatively new field of positive psychology, Dacher is the executive editor of Greater Good, the founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and a co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness. His prolific research and writing have helped to transform our understanding of what it means to be human by investigating positive attributes such as compassion, empathy, cooperation, and altruism as the evolutionary endowment that enabled our survival and flourishing as a species, and that make us–well–human.

Here is a description of the domain of positive psychology that makes it clear why ILI includes basic elements of positive psychology in its programming for lawyers:

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. . . . This field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.

Positive Psychology has three central concerns: positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. Understanding positive emotions entails the study of contentment with the past, happiness in the present, and hope for the future. Understanding positive individual traits consists of the study of the strengths and virtues, such as the capacity for love and work, courage, compassion, resilience, creativity, curiosity, integrity, self-knowledge, moderation, self-control, and wisdom. Understanding positive institutions entails the study of the strengths that foster better communities, such as justice, responsibility, civility, parenting, nurturance, work ethic, leadership, teamwork, purpose, and tolerance.

Dacher Keltner’s research interests include not only the workings of emotion and power in social relationships (areas of obvious relevance to lawyers whose clients are experiencing legal issues that arise from fractured human relationships) but also human morality. Here is how he describes that aspect of his work:

My final research interest lies in the study of how humans negotiate moral concerns. Here I have examined how opposing partisans tend to assume that they alone see the issues objectively and in principled fashion, a tendency we call “naive realism”. We have shown that opposing partisans attribute extremism and bias to their opponents.

In studies of moral judgment, I have shown how emotions such as anger, sadness, and fear influence judgments of causality, fairness, and risk. More recently, I have begun to study the contents of three moral domains – autonomy, community, and purity – and how these domains relate to emotion and prejudice.

Morality, “neuro-morality,” and positive psychology are vectors that ILI includes in its programs teaching Integrative Law. It is exciting and gratifying for us to have the support of one of the most creative scholars in the field.

ILI is proud to announce that the Hon. Thelton E. Henderson, Senior Judge of the U.S.District Court for the Northern District of California, has accepted an invitation to join the Integrative Law Institute’s Advisory Board.

Judge Henderson’s judicial career is remarkable. A graduate of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, Henderson immediately joined Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department as the only African American member of the Civil Rights Division, during the height of Martin Luther King’s campaign against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. After achieving many other “firsts” in both law practice and academia, including a stint as Dean of Students at Stanford University Law School, he was appointed to the federal bench as the first African American on the District Court for the Northern District of California, and the first African American Chief Judge of that court.

Judge Henderson’s distinguished career as a federal judge includes rulings on many of the most critical and difficult issues of our time, ranging from halting the slaughter of dolphins by the tuna industry, to striking down California’s controversial anti-affirmative action initiative, to placing the California prison healthcare system under federal receivership during Arnold Schwartznegger’s administration as governor. Thelton Henderson’s career exemplifies hisconviction that the U.S. Constitution is a living document belonging to all of us, and represents the best of the U.S. legal system.

His perspective and vision will contribute greatly to ILI’s mission: reclaiming law as a healing profession.

A strong, innovative Advisory Board helps ILI to build outstanding programming at the intersection of law, social policy, neuroscience, positive psychology, restorative justice, and other Integrative Law vectors. We are proud to announce the following new members of ILI’s Advisory Board:

Susan Swaim Daicoff,J.D., LL.M., M.S, visiting professor of law at University of Florida’s Levin School of Law, and author of Lawyer, Know Thyself: A Psychological Analysis of Personality Strengths and Weaknesses (Law and Public Policy), as well as a new textbook, Comprehensive Law Practice: Law as a Healing Profession, and many journal articles exploring the cognitive and social psychology of lawyers. She is a leader in the emerging integrative law movement.

Marco Iacoboni, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and author of Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others . Iacoboni pioneered the research on mirror neurons, the “smart cells” in our brain that allow us to understand others.

It’s an honor to have the support of pioneering thinkers and researchers of this caliber.

We are inviting other leaders in fields relating to Integrative Law to join ILI’s Advisory Board this year and will announce new members from time to time.